Volunteers

Volunteers (1985)

Ready or not, here they come.

After graduating from Yale in 1962, womanizing Lawrence flees a gambling debt that his rich dad won't pay and takes his roomie's place as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Thai Golden Triangle with two other PCVs. Will he survive two years?

Date of release
1985-08-16
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (189)
Runtime
1h 47m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Nicholas Meyer

Casting

Interesting facts

Volunteers is a 1985 American comedy film directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Tom Hanks, John Candy, and Rita Wilson.

Production

The film was in the works for six years before it was made. Volunteers was filmed in Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The filmmakers built a Thai village based on the Karen people of Burma's Golden Triangle, building the world's longest wooden suspension bridge, which was more than 250 yd (230 m) long. A cast of more than 100 people from around the world, including Thai families, spent two and a half months filming.

Meyer states that the director of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver, read the script and complained that it "was like spitting on the American flag", and he demanded changes. The changes were never made, but by the time the film was released, Shriver was no longer director, and Peace Corps officials were willing to endorse the film.

This film marked the reunion of Hanks and Candy, who had starred in Splash. It is also the film in which Hanks reconnected with his future wife, Rita Wilson, whom he had met when they worked on an episode of Bosom Buddies.

The scene in which Wilson and Hanks enjoy Coca-Cola was criticized as product placement, as TriStar was a unit of Columbia Pictures, then owned by The Coca-Cola Company. Cowriter Levine denies this, stating that the scene appeared in the first draft of the film written in 1980, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was to be the studio.

The film spoofs a number of David Lean epics, including Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai, with the Washington State University Fight Song used in place of the "Colonel Bogey March".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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